Various approaches have been developed for measuring distributed properties of a given location, such as temperature or pressure. However, conventional techniques may not provide a desired resolution or accuracy.
Distributed temperature systems (DTS), for example, may employ a pulse of light sent down a fiber. A portion of the scattered light from the fiber is analyzed to determine temperature of the fiber. Conventional optical time-domain reflectometry (OTDR) DTS systems are generally limited in their spatial resolution by the width of the light pulse they generate to interrogate a fiber, and associated spreading of the light pulse. Current state of the art may provide about 50 centimeters of spatial resolution; however, in many applications it may be desired to resolve temperatures to smaller spatial resolutions. Potentially, smaller resolutions may be achieved by using shorter light pulses. However, use of shorter light pulses would result in a required tradeoff between shorter light pulses and the amount of scattered signal received back from the fiber. Furthermore, ultra-fast paced laser sources that are required for generating shorter light pulses are cost prohibitive for almost all applications.